What you did not know about Encaustic!!

If you do not know what Encaustic medium is then come along to one of my beginners Workshop to find out.

Contact me via email at [email protected] to find out when and where my next workshop will be.

It like a light bulb moment when you gasps the delights of this very old medium, to tell you the truth it’s over 2000 years old when it was widely used by the Greeks and Egyptians from the 1st century BC thorough to the 2nd century AD from painting mummy portraits to seal their boats. As is the image I have shared with you which is from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Egypt The Roman authors, including Pliny the Elder, who mentions artists working in the medium several hundred years earlier. Icons paintings during the Byzantine period but as tempera paintings grew in popularity, encaustic nearly disappeared. Wax was still used for other artistic purposes during the Middle Ages and encaustic wax was in limited use during the Renaissance the a renewed interest in the mid-eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century with the invention of the Bunsen burner several notable mineteenth-century painters, including Paul Gauguin experimented with painting with wax. Then in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, occasionally refer to this medium but it wasn’t until the twentieth century that artists obtained equipment like electric hot plates, heat gun and irons that is began to be incorporated as a medium again.

Mexican artist Diego Rivera husband of Frida Kahlo used wax to create a mural in Mexico City by applying pigmented wax to a wall and fusing it with a blowtorch. Several Abstract Expressionist artist including Jackson Pollack experimented with wax-cased medias too.

Jasper John an American artist along with Brice Marden and Lynda Benglis created the art with this medium.

About the Author

I was born in New Zealand and moved to live in Greece many years ago, and come back to New Zealand at least once or twice a year now. I do speak English and Greek.
As I am recognized for my bold and colourful work in different mediums that create structure, depth, movement and texture, nothing excites me more than taking up my brushes and directing my energy into every stroke on a canvas. This is a slow progress of building up the image, in which time has no relevance in the creation of my work, which absorbs me completely.
Light is an important factor when using colours especially for myself and that is why living on the island of Aegina in Greece, which is famous for the luminosity and clarity of its light, is an ideal place for my studio.
The landscape and sea around the island makes for an invaluable addition in my life which inspires my work.